What CES revealed about where creator marketing is heading

What CES revealed about where creator marketing is heading

The challenge for most brands is no longer access to creators, but confidence in the signals guiding selection.

As creator marketing budgets grow, tolerance for thin data continues to shrink. Follower counts, engagement rates and surface-level audience insights once felt sufficient. Increasingly, they feel like placeholders for something more robust. Marketers are being asked harder questions about what is actually driving outcomes, which creators genuinely influence behaviour, and whether the data behind those decisions can stand up to scrutiny.

At CES this year, a series of announcements from Omnicom brought that tension into focus. The emphasis was not on creators themselves, but on the data, signals and systems beginning to sit behind creator decision-making. For many marketers, it clarified that the next phase of creator marketing will be defined less by access and more by intelligence.

Why CES matters and why these announcements resonated

CES, the Consumer Electronics Show, is typically where infrastructure surfaces. It is where emerging approaches move out of experimentation and into systems designed to scale.

Seen through that lens, Omnicom Media Group’s announcements were less about individual partnerships and more about intent. They reflected how the largest players in the market are responding to growing expectations around accountability in creator marketing. Not as a finished blueprint, but as an indication of where investment and attention are now shifting.

When a holding company moves in this direction, it is rarely about novelty. It is about addressing gaps that have become increasingly difficult to ignore. In this case, the gap is not creative capability, but intelligence.

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What was announced and what it reveals for marketers

The specific partnerships announced at CES matter less than the patterns they reveal. Each points to the same underlying shift. Creator marketing is moving away from proxy metrics and towards more direct, more meaningful signals.

The Pinterest collaboration highlighted the value of intent-rich environments, where creator content sits alongside planning and decision-making behaviour. The takeaway here is not Pinterest itself, but context. Creators operating in high-intent environments play a different role from those optimised purely for awareness, and the data used to support those activations needs to reflect that difference.

The Walmart and Meta announcement pointed to a similar evolution. As purchase data becomes part of the conversation, creators are increasingly evaluated based on how their audiences behave, not just how their content performs socially. This is a shift many brands have anticipated, even if they have not yet had the tools to act on it fully.

Taken together, these moves suggest that creator marketing is no longer constrained by access to creators. It is constrained by access to signals. Intent, behaviour, context, safety and relevance are becoming as important as reach.

What richer creator data unlocks

This shift is often discussed in terms of accountability, but that only tells part of the story. More interesting is what becomes possible when creator marketing is supported by richer data.

When brands have a clearer view of intent, context and behaviour, briefs improve. They become more focused and more respectful of creators’ strengths. Creators are no longer asked to stretch across every objective, but to contribute where they are most effective.

Better data does not narrow creativity. It gives it direction. It allows brands to take smarter risks, creators to work with clearer purpose, and campaigns to feel more relevant rather than repetitive.

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Why Fabulate’s technology roadmap has focused on this shift

At Fabulate, this perspective has guided how we think about creator marketing for some time. The category has always been a data challenge as much as a creative one. The volume of content, the speed of platforms and the complexity of audiences make manual analysis difficult to sustain at scale.

As Nathan Powell, Co-Founder at Fabulate, puts it, “Creator marketing has scaled incredibly quickly, but the data supporting it has not always kept pace. As investment grows, brands naturally look for stronger signals to guide decision-making. That is not about questioning the value of creators, it is about giving the category the same analytical foundations as any other serious media investment.”

This is why Fabulate has invested in AI-powered solutions designed to analyse creator content, audience signals and brand alignment in greater depth. Not to replace human judgement, but to support it.

“For a long time, influencer marketing relied on proxies because that was all that was available,” Powell continues. “What we are seeing now is a shift towards understanding intent, behaviour and context in much greater depth. That creates better outcomes for brands, but it also leads to better briefs and more meaningful partnerships for creators.”

Richer data does not remove the human element from creator marketing. It makes collaboration more intentional and decision-making more confident.

Where this leaves creator marketing

CES reflected a category beginning to invest properly in the systems that support creators. It marked a shift towards treating creator marketing with the same seriousness as any other media channel, backed by better data and clearer expectations.

“The most interesting part of this evolution is that better data does not reduce creativity,” Powell adds. “It helps direct it. When brands are clearer on who they are trying to reach and why, creators are given more space to do what they do best. That is where the next phase of growth in this industry will come from.”

Creator marketing has not changed overnight. But CES offered a clear view of where it is heading. For brands willing to invest in smarter signals and more intelligent foundations, that direction brings far more opportunity than risk.

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